DESIRE

Lately, I've been noticing a vague, undifferentiated desire. Not hunger, but something like it; if I go for something, say a bit of chocolate or some tea, it isn't satisfied. I know what real hunger is like, and real satiation, a quiet hum in the body after some good food. This isn't like that.

Sometimes, I linger with it, and the first thing that peels away is any need to satisfy its demand, which has been amorphous anyway. Stripped of that, it hovers in consciousness, resolving itself into my breathing, or a fullness in my throat, or some other bodily sense; or a thought, or something someone is saying to me; some experience, the desire disappearing in the process. A ghost or a vapor barely perceptible, resolving into the next thing.

It's always disappearing, always not quite there, hinting at some quiet emptiness that is somehow alive. Something like being at an event horizon, feeling the pull toward . . . nothing. The pull itself is the the only movement; the destination is the next thing I'm involved in. Try to focus on it and it disappears into the looking; try to move it around or change it or identify it and it disappears into the effort.

I could say that I disappear and reappear, going in and out of the everyday world of thoughts and things in an endlessly repeating cycle, but how strange to contemplate the in-between, when I am not there, you are not there, but life is!